


Gaudeamus Igitur

by daughteroflilith



Series: Songs of Innocence and Experience [7]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Boarding School, Enemies to Lovers, F/F, Magic, Magical Boarding School, Old Flames, Oral Sex, Second Chances, Trope Deconstruction, Vaginal Fingering, What Happens After Heroines Grow Up?, f/f - Freeform, the one that got away, what happens next?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-06
Updated: 2020-04-06
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:42:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23514100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daughteroflilith/pseuds/daughteroflilith
Summary: Gwendolyn, the former savior of the magical world and current park ranger, returns to her cabin to find that her old school rival, Patricia , has come to pay her a visit.Have you ever wondered what happens to magical heroines when their quest is done, when they have to grow up and move on with their lives. This that story. It's also the story of what happens when two old rivals realize that after all these years there is something more between them than hostility.
Relationships: Destined chosen one/ School Rival, Original Female Character/Original Female Character, Witch/Witch - Relationship
Series: Songs of Innocence and Experience [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1390747
Comments: 13
Kudos: 39





	Gaudeamus Igitur

**Author's Note:**

> I've always love the magical boarding school genre. I grew up reading as many YA novels about chosen ones, wunderkinds, and destined heroines as I could find. As I've gotten older, I've often found myself wondering what happened to all those heroes and heroines after they faced their final battles. What kind of life could someone lead after they've accomplished their destiny before they were even old enough to vote? How would someone cope with the trauma of having spent her school years in a desperate fight for survival? This story is my attempt to answer that.

Gwendolyn knew that someone was in her cabin long before she reached the door. Her visitor had tripped off her magical wards but the car parked behind her truck and the tracks in the snow leading to her front door were far more mundane giveaways.

Her visitor could have easily been another park ranger or a lost tourist. However, the fact that a tiny Mazda had somehow gotten up the unplowed mountain road rather suggested to her that it was either driven by an utter lunatic or a magic-user.

It was likely to be both. That was the thing about being famous, at least in the magical world, sooner or later some crazy person fixated and came after you. She still had nightmares about the warlock who’d abducted her from the Hartfield School of the Magical Arts during her fourth year. He hadn’t even been a minion of the Dark Lady, just utterly insane, convinced that they were meant to be together. That had been the day she learned that she could do magic without a wand. It had also been the day she learned that she could kill with a touch. Her kidnapper had been the first person she ever killed and she hadn’t even done it on purpose. He hadn’t been the last either.

Gwendolyn reached into her coat pocket for the wand that wasn’t there. She didn’t carry one anymore but years of habit were hard to overcome. As she stood there in the snow, debating what to do, a light in the living room came on, as if in response to the setting sun. Her burglar was certainly brazen.

She trudged up the wooden steps. She called her magic to her hands as she reached for the door. Most magic users needed a wand and words to draw their power. For her, though, it was as easy as flexing a muscle. The wand had never been more than a formality. It made sense really, considering whose daughter she’d turned out to be.

She stepped in, hands slightly raised.

“About time,” announced the dark-haired woman sitting on the couch. Patricia Rosewood looked exactly like what a villainess should look like, from her raven locks to her perfect porcelain skin. It was a shame really, that she hadn’t turned out to be one, not exactly.

As a girl,Patricia had always used her looks to her advantage. In school, she had rolled up her skirts as short as she could get away with, tailored her shirts to pull tight against her chest, and left buttons undone. She’d worn lipstick so red it looked like blood and painted her eyes dark and smokey.

She had perfected the art of the cold smile and the haughty look. Everyone had wanted her, Gwendolyn included, although she’d have died before admitting that to anyone. In some ways, it had made her hate her rival even more. Desiring her girlhood tormenter had been a special kind of hell.

The woman sitting on the couch didn’t look much like the girl she remembered. Her face had grown leaner. Without makeup, she looked washed out, like a porcelain doll that hadn’t been painted yet. The dark circles beneath her eyes stole much of the youth that remained in her face.

She still had her figure but it was hidden beneath a heavy cable knit sweater and baggy jeans. She had her boots up on the coffee table. Her hair, that beautiful silky black hair that had haunted so many of Gwendolyn’s adolescent dreams was unchanged. It was held back in a messy braid thrown over her shoulder.

“Want a drink?” Patricia held up an open bottle of whiskey.

“That’s mine,” was all Gwendolyn could manage to snap, not knowing what else to say.

“Well, you weren’t here to offer me any.”

Gwendolyn sighed and hung up her coat before she went to collect some glasses from the kitchen cabinet. “The hell are you doing here Patricia?”

“I can’t look up an old school chum?”

“We were hardly chums.” She brought the glasses over. She wasn’t sure what was going on but she had a feeling that Patricia wasn’t there to kill her. Whatever she was up to, Gwendolyn needed a drink before she could face it. What the hell had led Patricia to come looking for her after so long?

She pulled up a chair and set the glasses on the table. Patricia filled them both nearly to the brim, emptying the bottle. It seemed that she had very little respect for the best that Tennessee had to offer.

“We were frenemies at the least.”

“No, you just tormented me non-stop for seven years.”

Patricia looked at her, really looked at her. As a girl, she’d have tilted her head down just enough to gaze up through her lashes beguilingly before saying something cruel. As a woman, she looked at her straight on. “I suppose I did. I was a little bitch. In the end, you saved my life anyway.”

“If you’ve come to apologize, I don’t want to hear it.”

Patricia took up one of the glasses. “I wouldn’t dare presume.”

“Then why are you here?”

“I never did thank you for saving me.”

“Trust me, it was just coincidental. I was trying to save the entire magical world. If you want to thank someone, thank Betty Beadle, she was the one who betrayed everyone and everything she’d ever known to beg me to stop the Dark Lady from sacrificing you. She was the one who showed me where to go, who opened all the locks and seals to get me into the Chamber of Shadows.”

“She did,” Patricia sounded very tired.

“Whatever happened between you two anyway? Shouldn’t you be off making little dark magic babies with her? That’s what everyone is doing these days now that the war is over.” Her friends certainly were. She’d been the maid of honor at John and Mindy’s wedding, she was godmother to their first daughter. They had three children now. She still visited them sometimes but all it took was a day or two in that crowded noisy house before it was all too much for her.

Patricia looked down at the amber liquid in her glass but seemed to have lost her taste for it. “We gave it a go, even got married and everything but it didn’t work out.”

That surprised Gwendolyn, “Wait, seriously? I would have thought you two were meant to be. You were thick as thieves from first year onwards. She loved you so much she almost died for you that night.”

Patricia tensed, her shoulders hunching like a brooding hawk. “Sometimes love isn’t enough. Honestly, how messed up is the magical community that everyone seems to think marrying your middle-school sweetheart is a good idea?”

She reached for her drink, nearly draining it. “People change, no one is the same person at twenty-five that they were at eleven.”

“You have a point there. When did you divorce?”

“Last month but that was just the paperwork bit.”

That explained a lot.

“Don’t you have someone else to get drunk with?” asked Gwendolyn. “Perhaps on the other side of the ocean?”

“Not really, I’m not exactly on speaking terms to any of my school friends or family, they were all in the room that night. They watched as I was dragged to that altar and chained to it in that ridiculous white dress, they watched as the Dark Lady slit my wrist open, they watched as she raised the dagger to drive it into my heart. They had all known me my whole life and none of them, not even my parents, tried to save me.”

“Shit.” What else could she say? Looking at everything from her perspective, what else had Patricia expected? Her parents had belonged to the Dark Council and sworn their loyalty to a woman who literally called herself the Dark Lady. Then again, how often do children think that their own parents are the villains?

Patricia kept talking, not quite drunk but definitely feeling the alcohol. “I was never able to go home after that. When I got out of the hospital, Headmistress Harper let me stay with her for a bit. It’s funny, I know she never liked me, but she was kind anyway. I guess she knew what it was like to lose everything. I enrolled in a normie university in London and never looked back. I got an engineering degree. The normies, don’t have anything but math to keep their buildings from falling down, so I got good at numbers and now I design buildings. Betty came with me, she became a vet, she always loved animals. We had a good life among the normies.”

Gwendolyn knew she was supposed to ask what went wrong. She’d listened to enough monologues and confessions over the years to have a sense of how this sort of thing went. As a girl, she’d have been kind, she’d have been patient, but all the years of nightmares since the end of the war had worn her brittle and thin. “So did she leave you for an exotic animal vet or what?”

She’d meant for her words to hurt but Patricia just shook her head. “No. She just missed her family.” The dark-haired witch drew her arms around herself. “Both our families started trying to contact us immediately after that night. My parents even tried to see me in the hospital, that was how they were captured by the White Council.”

Patricia took a breath that almost sounded like a sob but she fought it down. “I’ll never understand how they could hand me over to the Dark Lady to be sacrificed when my name was drawn and yet still pretend to care afterward. After the general amnesty, they kept trying, as if the White Council giving them a pardon for the crimes they committed somehow meant I should forgive them.

“Betty’s parents were the same. They kept sending letters and emails and calling and sometimes even showing up at our apartment door as if they hadn’t been just as ready to hand her over to be murdered on that altar. Eventually, Betty cracked. One day, two years ago I came home and she was sitting with her parents in the living room.”

“You couldn’t forgive her for that?” asked Gwendolyn, far more drawn into the story than she wanted to admit. There were a lot of people in her life she hadn’t forgiven, Headmistress Harper among them.

“Of course I could. If it had just been that, I could have dealt with it. The thing was, she started talking to everyone again, the rest of her family, even our old friends. At first, it was just her sometimes going to her parent’s house for a holiday and then she wanted me to go with her and I couldn’t, I just couldn’t. Betty wasn’t there for most of what happened on the night of the ritual because she’d run to get help but I remember how her father handed the Dark Lady the dagger, how her mother held the bowl that caught the blood from my wrist. I couldn’t face those people over Christmas dinner.

“Eventually she started to tell me I should talk to my parents again, hear them out. She said everyone else whose parents had been part of the Dark Council, all those whose names had been in the lottery, had forgiven their families after the amnesty. Well maybe they could, maybe they were all able to convince themselves that their parents wouldn’t have really let the Dark Lady kill them. I didn’t have that luxury.

“Betty and I fought more and more until eventually, she moved back to Bridgewater. I filed for divorce and refused to talk to her until the court hearing. I hope she’s happy, I hope she’s safe among those murderers but I’m done.” Her hands shook so badly she had to set them in her lap.

Gwendolyn didn’t know what to say. She almost said she understood, at least the part where she knew what it felt like to feel completely and utterly betrayed. That didn’t feel like the right thing to say though. “You ever think of getting help for the PTSD?”

“Have you? As far as I can tell you’re just hiding in the woods, in Tennessee of all places.”

“I’m a park ranger, thank you very much. I’m not hiding and I did get help. I found a witch with a psychology degree, who works with magic users who’ve suffered trauma. I still skype with her every other week.”

“Does it help?”

“Some. I still wake up screaming in the night but I don’t have the flashbacks in the day anymore. Being here, away from everything and everyone, that helps too. The war never really crossed the Atlantic. The magic users in the US, especially outside the cities, are more spread out and even the ones who recognize me only know me from reading about me in the Enchanted Times. They don’t idolize or hate me like nearly every bloody witch, warlock, and mage does back in Europe.”

“I’d take either of those reactions to the looks of pity I still get. You got to be the hero. I was just the virgin sacrifice.”

Gwendolyn drained her glass and refilled it. She didn’t feel like talking about being a hero or its opposite, so instead, she turned the conversation, “You weren’t a virgin, I totally caught you and Betty in the second-floor loo, more than once, mind you. Also in the Walktzing Woods and the fifth-floor broom closet. You two occupying that closet was a huge inconvenience by the way.”

Patricia smirked, “I know what Betty and I were doing in that closet, what were you?”

“There was a secret passage.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah. There was a whole network of them. How do you think I was always sneaking around the school? I found an old map in the school library during my first year.”

“I thought you could teleport or turn invisible or something.”

“Teleportation is impossible and I never actually managed to perfect any illusion spells. It’s the one area of magic I’m shit at.”

“Go figure,” Patricia’s lip was turned up ever so slightly in what may have been a smile. It faded just as quickly as a thought occurred to her. “Do you ever miss Hartfield?”

“Sometimes. I knew who I was when I was there, at least I thought I did.”

“Same,” said Patricia.

“Except it was all a lie wasn’t it?” Gwendolyn reached for her glass, unable to continue this conversation fully sober. “I wasn’t really the chosen one when it all came down to it, was I?”

“You were chosen alright.”

Gwendolyn stood, pacing on the scratched wooden floor. She felt suddenly and terribly cold but couldn’t bring herself to bother to light a fire in the large fireplace, she’d never been much good at fire starting spells and it always took a while to do it the old-fashioned way. They’d just have to depend on the cabin’s crummy electric heat. “Chosen to be the earthly vessel of an eldritch god, the bringer of death and destruction. Everything, everything that Headmistress Harper and the rest of the White Council told me was a lie. I spent my whole life believing that the Dark Lady had killed my birth parents only to learn that she was my mother. All those years, the Dark Lady wasn’t trying to kill me, she was trying to steal me back to use for her own purposes.”

Patricia watched her with weary green eyes. The confidence, the challenge, even the glee of her school days was long gone.

“She wasn’t a true mother to you, any more than mine was to me. Mothers don’t hand over their children to be sacrificed as hosts to evil entities.”

Gwendolyn walked to the window, looking at the darkness of the mountainside, “Daughters don’t murder their mothers either.”

“You didn’t murder her.”

“I shoved a dagger in her heart, the same dagger she tried to kill you with. Everyone says I’m a hero but I’ve killed more people than most serial killers. What makes it worse is I did it all before my eighteenth birthday.”

“Self-defense isn’t murder.” Patricia stood, crossing the room towards Gwendolyn. She reached out as if to touch her shoulder and then thought better of it. “And you spared almost everyone else in that room, my parents and sister included. Even when you had the power of an elder god and you could have destroyed the entire Dark Council with a single thought, you stopped yourself. You never hurt anyone you didn’t have to.”

Gwendolyn leaned against the windowsill, pressing her forehead against the cold glass. “You begged me to. Soaked in blood and barely conscious, you still begged me not to kill the people who hurt you. I never told you, but your voice was what brought me back, what grounded me. If you hadn’t stopped me, I don’t know what I would have done.” Well, she did actually, that was why she still woke up screaming.

“My words can’t have meant that much.”

Gwendolyn pushed back from the window, turning and then putting her back to it, so she could look at her old rival. “Of course they did. I was in love with you back then, you know.”

The other woman started and then looked away. “You never said.”

“I wasn’t a fool. You’d have mocked me for it. Don’t deny it.”

“I would have, all the more so because I wanted you. Why do you think I was always so cruel?”

“You’re fucking kidding me. You were with Betty anyway.”

“That doesn’t mean I was blind. You were always cute in a scrawny dirty blond sort of way, you still are.” She looked back, almost shyly. Shy was a strange look on Patricia.

They were so close that Gwendolyn could see the faint beginning of crow’s feet at the edge of the other woman’s eyes. How hard had the last several years been to etch those lines so very young? Probably as hard as the years that had already streaked Gwendolyn’s hair with scattered strands of grey.

“You sure know how to compliment a woman,” Sarcasm had always been Gwendolyn’s refuge.

It was Patricia who closed the distance between them. Her hand was warm as she cupped Gwendolyn’s cheek. “Do you know how much I wanted to kiss you all those years ago?”

“Yes, if it was anywhere near as much as I wanted to kiss you.”

And then there was nothing left to do but bring their lips together. Gwendolyn leaned forward, rising up on the front of her snow booted feet so that she could kiss the taller woman. It occurred to Gwendolyn, even in the passion of the kiss that the other woman’s lips were chapped, so were hers, it was the damn dry air.

She found herself running her hands over the dark hair she’d ached for so long to touch. She caught the bit of elastic that held Patricia’s braid and tugged it loose. They were both breathless by the time they broke the kiss.

“We’re really doing this then?” said Patricia, as if the whole situation somehow surprised her, as if she hadn’t flown across an entire ocean and driven up a mountain to find Gwendolyn.

“If you’ll have me,” Gwendolyn felt suddenly caught out, her hands still tangled in the other woman’s hair where she’d been about to draw her back into another kiss. She wanted her so much. She ached for the girl she remembered and the woman before her, memory and the present were so tangled she didn’t know where one ended and the other began. She just knew that her body burned and her heart ached.

Patricia kissed her in answer and then began tugging her towards the couch.

“Wait,” said Gwendolyn.

All kinds of hurt bloomed in the other woman’s eyes.

“That couch is tiny, the bed is at least a little bigger,” she said quickly. “And the heat works better in the bedroom than here.”

Patricia let out a sharp breath and then looked uncertainly towards the hallway and the closed doors.

Gwendolyn took her hand, “This way.”

The bedroom was a total disaster of boots and socks and inside out dirty shirts. Gwendolyn had been fairly tidy all the years at Hartfield when she’d had a roommate but those habits had fallen by the wayside in all the years of living alone since. Of all the wild fantasies that Gwendolyn had of Patricia, none of them had ever involved the other woman sitting down on the edge of a laundry strewn bed and struggling to unlace heavy snow boots.

Her fantasies certainly hadn’t involved herself doing the same. Somewhere in the whole shoe removal process, the awkwardness began to seep in again. When she looked back at Patricia, she was busy tugging her sweater over her head.

None of Gwendolyn’s fantasies had ever involved Patricia getting partially stuck in a turtleneck either. A truly ridiculous part of herself desperately wanted to giggle. She helped free the other woman of the knitted garment and then the grey shirt beneath. Then she kissed those wonderful lips, running her hands again through that dark hair she was still amazed she could touch. It cracked beneath her fingers from the static electricity that was everywhere in the cabin in winter.

Her bra had surely once been a seductive red but was now faded, likely from too many cycles through the washing machine rather than being washed by hand. It didn’t seem the sort of bra a woman would put on when she set out to seduce an old crush.Then again from what Gwendolyn could tell, Patricia hadn’t known what she was doing when she came looking for her.

The breasts beneath the bra when she reached behind her to help her with the clasp and draw it away, those were as incredible as her wildest imaginings, full and pale and perfectly formed. Her nipples were the same flushed pink as her lips and instantly pebbled at the feel of the cold air of the room.

Gwendolyn cupped one of those wonderful breasts in her palm and brought her mouth down to the nipple as she urged Patricia to lie back. Patricia seemed for once in her life, content to let someone take charge, at least for the moment.

She made a pleased sound and ran her fingers through the softness of Gwendolyn’s short gold-brown hair. She didn’t pull, funny, Gwendolyn would have always guessed that she was a hair puller.

Pushing her luck, she brought a hand lower, finding the button of Patricia’s jeans and then the zipper. She did have to briefly abandon the breast to look at what she was doing. Patricia helped her. Between Patricia raising her hips and Gwendolyn tugging, they got her pants and underwear off.

Somewhere in the process, Gwendolyn did notice something that drew a laugh from her. “Strawberry print?”

“Oh shut up, they were on sale at Primark.”

“You, Patricia Rosewood, bought discounted underwear at Primark?”

“Plenty of people buy underwear at Primark, it’s not as if I have access to my family’s money anymore.” She sat up, glaring at Gwendolyn. She looked like her old self then, the fierce and proud girl who had walked through the halls of Hartfield as if she owned it. “Where do you get yours?”

Goddess, Gwendolyn had missed her so much. She couldn’t fight her smile. “Costco mostly.”

Patricia grabbed at her pants, “I bet they are worse than mine, let me see.”

The next minute was a scramble of Patricia very determinedly getting Gwendolyn undressed.

“An orange sports bra and panties with blue polka dots, you’ve no grounds to mock me.”

Gwendolyn quickly rid herself of both of the offending garments. “In my defense, I had no idea that a beautiful woman was going to fling herself at me today.”

“You think I’m beautiful,” said Patricia, leaning forward, to caress one of Gwendolyn’s modest breasts. When she caught the nipple between her fingers it was all Gwendolyn could do to not close her eyes and gasp.

“You know you are, you always have been. You always will be, even in strawberry underwear.”

“Flatterer, words have always been your strength, Gwen.” Now it was Patricia who was nudging her backward. “Half the reason I picked fights with you was just to hear what you’d say.”

Gwendolyn laid back, pulling Patricia down into her arms. “Now you tell me.”

“You enjoyed it.”

“A little.”

And then the time for words was past. Gwendolyn rolled them, pressing Patricia beneath herself. When she nudged the other woman’s legs open and brought her hand to their apex she found her wet and eager.

“Please,” begged Patricia.

Gwendolyn had never heard that word from her before and it was all almost too much. She’d have given the very magic in her blood to hear it again.

She tried to begin gently, lightly pressing her fingers against Patricia’s clit to get a sense of what kind of pressure she liked. Patricia bucked her hips.

“Please, don’t tease me, I can’t… I can’t wait. Just fuck me.”

So Gwendolyn did, easing two and then three fingers into the woman’s slick cunt, pressing her other hand against the bed for leverage and balance. She fucked her deep and hard, and then harder still curling her fingers a bit to hit the right spot as Patricia’s cries grew more desperate.

The sight before her was beyond her most decadent imagining. Patricia had her head thrown back against the pillow, her face and neck and breastbone were all so flushed that Gwendolyn could tell even in the dim lamplight of the room. Her lips were just slightly open and her eyes scrunched closed with her desperate pleasure. She was very close.

Gwendolyn shortened the thrusts of her fingers just enough that she could bring her thumb roughly against Patricia’s clit and that was all it took. The other woman arched her back and clenched on her fingers hard.

She fucked her through her tremors either through one long orgasm or possibly a smaller second, it was hard to tell. When Patricia was done, she simply went limp, struggling for breath as at last her eyes flickered lazily open.

Gwendolyn eased her fingers from her and stretched out beside her. What she didn’t expect was how quickly a grinning Patricia was rolling on top of her. She was desperate enough she certainly had no complaints.

Patricia didn’t waste any time. “Tell me what you want.”

“Your mouth.”

She kissed her way down her body like she had all the time in the world. It was torture and it was paradise. When she brought her mouth to Gwendolyn’s center, she quickly showed her how truly talented she was.

Gwendolyn clutched at the sheets and enjoyed everything that Patricia had to give her. She brought her off once like that and then again with her fingers and then they were both truly spent.

They lay tangled together for a long time in a tangle of limbs, with a blanket half pulled over them.

“So what happens next?” asked Patricia.

“We go to sleep.”

“I meant tomorrow, you jerk.”

“I don’t know about you, but I need to put on my snowshoes and check on some of the trails. You can come if you want.”

The dark-haired woman lightly thumped her on the nose with a single finger. “Stop avoiding the question.”

Gwendolyn caught her hand and kissed the palm. “I am answering it. We spent our girlhoods with lives planned out for us and by the merit of our courage and luck we survived and defied those fates. I’m done with plans, I’m done with destiny. Now I live one day at a time.”

“I think I can get used to that.”

“So do you want to go snowshoeing tomorrow?”

“Only if you make me breakfast.”

“I see you’re as bossy as ever, “ she leaned forward to kiss Patricia on the tip of her nose, “and yes, I’ll make you breakfast beautiful.”

They drifted off together beneath the warmth of the covers as a fresh snow began to fall upon the eaves of the cabin.

**Author's Note:**

> If you liked this story come check out my website catherineyoungbooks.com I've got more writing there and update more often than on AO3.


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